Local Communities

We employ a social network approach to explore the Internet's impact on the
capacity of community associations. We focus on how increased e-mail use
affects the cohesion and democratic character of associations, and
operationalize these concepts employing the standard social network measures of
density and centralization. The analysis employs network data from 41 community
associations that are comparable on a variety of factors, but which vary in
their use of the Internet. It finds that the technological nature of e-mail as
well as the background and interests of its users matter. Members of community
associations do consider e-mail to be a distinctive communication mode and
employ it differently from other modes such as phone and face-to-face
communication. Increased use of e-mail is found to be associated with increased
network density, a critical support for collective action. In contrast,
increased e-mail use can either lead to increased or decreased network
centralization, an indicator of the degree to which associational activities
provide opportunities for the development of civic skills. In associations with
relatively similar levels of e-mail use among members, the technology leads to
more decentralized communication patterns, but in associations with disparate
reliance on e-mail, e-mail use is associated with increased centralization.

Increased citizen-to-citizen discussion and deliberation is an important
potential of digital government initiatives. This paper presents findings from
a longitudinal study of such outcomes using household survey data, focus groups
and one-on-one interviews from a mature community network -- the Blacksburg
Electronic Village (BEV) in Blacksburg, Virginia, and surrounding Montgomery
County. It addresses the questions of who is using computer networking for
civic participation, what impact the Internet has on their involvement with
other people and local community, and the design problems that citizens
experience with local e-government initiatives. A pattern of Internet use is
emerging in which local formal and ad hoc groups of interested citizens
distribute information on issues of interest among themselves and use online
tools to raise awareness and educate, and under some circumstances to
deliberate on public policy. Modified tools are suggested to facilitate
deliberation and to integrate citizen feedback more effectively into local
government decision-making.

Local Communities: Relationships between 'real' and 'virtual' social capital

The paper explores forms of 'real' and 'virtual' social capital within a
geographical area of the UK comprising 65 'communities'. Measures of real
social capital based on formal community organisations were compared with
web-activity relating to the same communities. Three main types of websites
were identified: first a local government scheme which created 'identikit'
websites for each of the places which could then be taken up by local people;
second a similar scheme operated by a private company and covering the whole of
the UK; and third independent, bottom up sites created by social entrepreneurs
or community groups. Numbers and forms of organisations and websites, and
levels and forms of community web-based participation were measured for each
community at two points in 2004. The analysis suggests no strong correlation
between these measures of real and virtual social capital. The analysis further
suggests that providing a ready made website rarely results in the creation of
a developed community site -- although it may provide outlets for more limited
information exchanges. However bottom up sites which reflect the heterogeneity
of real communities are also rare. Interviews with participants suggest the
need to understand more about the social networks, practices and organisational
forms that sustain community engagement with community websites.

A longitudinal study of broadband civic network design is analyzed using
social construction of technology (SCOT) approach and then through the lens of
institutional theory. SCOT is useful to show how artifacts take on the forms
they do; institutional theory, by locating (design) action in a cultural,
historical and structural context can complement SCOT by explaining why they
tend to assume certain forms. Broadband civic networking initiatives often have
mixed goals: ensuring financial viability and realizing normative social aims.
In the present case, this tension was resolved by fitting the network's
technological and social form to a criterion of legitimacy prevailing among
power centers in the broader field; this succeeded in eliciting necessary
financial resources to sustain the network, but at the expense of the project's
normative aims. Institutional approaches theorize the relation of cultural
ideas and social structure, and that of structure and social action, to
interrogate micro-politics of social constructions and the
(intended/unintended) forms they assume. To engage the Why question,
constructivists need to theorize action. Sociological institutional theory
offers pointers.

We discuss the role and characteristics of informal learning in a community
computing context. We argue that minimalist design can be adapted to the needs
of community computing, and that its principles can be used to envision and
develop community activities and technologies that promote active learning. We
illustrate these ideas with several community computing projects that exemplify
how to embed learning in meaningful activities, enable learners to make
progress quickly, promote thinking and inference, evoke and leverage prior
knowledge, and support error recognition and recovery. We conclude with a
discussion of how minimalism might be used more broadly to guide the design of
community computing systems and activities.

Virtual Communities

How does a (virtual) community thrive and survive over time? From having
studied a thirteen-year old Swedish-language adventure mud, I here suggest that
our understanding of the answer has to be built on a social theory of learning
that takes into account that learning has to do with community, practice,
meaning and identity. Making a "career" in a community of practice can be
regarded as a movement from the periphery to the core, a movement from being a
novice to becoming an expert in the activities that are central to the
community. On that journey, the individual is over time "configured" into
learning how to act, reason and think about the community in the right way.

This paper suggests a relationship model for describing, analyzing and
foreseeing conflicts of interest in file-sharing networks. The model includes
levels of relationship ranging from the individual (ego), to the small group of
close peers (micro), to a larger network of acquaintances (meso) to the
anonymous larger network (macro). It is argued that an important focal point
for analysis of cooperation and conflict is situated in the relations between
these levels. Three examples of conflicts from a studied file-sharing network
are presented. Finally, the relationship model is discussed in terms of
applicability to other domains, recreational as well as professional.

Acceptance and Utility of a Systematically Designed Virtual Community for
Cancer Patients

Virtual Communities (VCs) offer ubiquitous access to information and
exchange possibilities for people in similar circumstances. This is especially
valuable for patients with chronic / life-threatening diseases as they exhibit
strong needs for information and interaction. Grounded on the preceding
findings of the analysis on the user-centric construction of the VC
krebsgemeinschaft.de, this article describes the evaluation of the underlying
design elements and success factors by assessing the user's acceptance and
usage of the site. The results obtained empirically substantiated insights into
the systematic development and operation of VCs in general and for a subgroup
of cancer patients in the German healthcare system in particular.

How to win a World Election: Emergent Leadership in an International Online
Community

Information communication technologies on the Internet such as Usenet,
Internet relay chats and multi-user dungeons have been used to enable virtual
communities. However, a new form of technology, the weblog, or "blog", has
quickly risen as a means for self-expression and sharing knowledge for people
across geographic distance. Though studies have focused on blogs in Western
countries, our study targets the global blogging community. Inspired by
previous studies that show significant differences in technology practices
across cultures, we conducted a survey to investigate the influence of regional
culture on a blogging community. We asked the research question of whether
bloggers are more influenced by their local cultures with respect to their
sense of community, or rather whether a "universal" Internet culture is a
stronger influence of community feeling. Our results, based on a multilingual
worldwide blogging survey of 1232 participants from four continents show that
while smaller differences could be found between Eastern and Western cultures,
overall the global blogging community is indeed dominated by an Internet
culture that shows no profound differences across cultures. However, one
significant exception was found in Japanese bloggers and their concealment of
identity.

Knowledge & Scientific Communities

Knowledge sharing communities can be found in many organizations, but their
forms and functions appear to be quite diverse. This implies that questions
concerning the functioning of communities, (how do they work) and questions
concerning success conditions (how to organize and facilitate them) cannot be
answered in a general way. The purpose of this article is to develop the theory
in this area by discovering basic dimensions along which communities differ,
and by identifying basic types of knowledge communities, underlying the
diversity of knowledge sharing groups. Through an analysis of the literature
and of a series of communities in large organizations, two basic dimensions and
five archetypes of knowledge communities are identified.

Local Virtuality in an Organization: Implications for Community of Practice

We focus on two phenomena in our case study of a high-tech firm. Local
virtuality: The pervasive use of computer mediated communication for
interaction with physical proximate people, even when located near-by.
Hyperconnectivity: The instant availability of people for communication
anywhere and anytime. We show that computer mediated communication has gone
beyond long-distance media to be the predominant mode of communication. The
result is a high level of trust and community, especially in a department with
high interdependence and a common goal.

This study examines distributed networks of practice in a multinational
organization in the energy and marine insurance industry. By taking a
differentiated view of intra-organizational networks of practice, we identified
three main categories of intra-organizational distributed networks of practice
in terms of their primary knowledge activities -- knowledge sharing,
incremental knowledge creation, and radical knowledge creation. We then
compared the networks along two dimensions: 1) the degree of diversity among
network participants and 2) the communication media used by the network
participants. Findings suggest that a higher degree of diversity is related to
a higher degree of knowledge creation activities, but too much diversity may be
restrictive when the primary activity is radical innovation. In addition, media
use findings indicated an unexpected reverse relationship in which networks of
practice with high task equivocality used leaner media than networks with less
task equivocality. The results also indicate that the degree of diversity of a
network's members may influence media use. Finally, support is found for second
level media effects of media choice within the networks of practice, such as
the degree to which individuals in the core of the network of practice may
protect their domain.

Genres are considered "as socially recognized types of communicative actions
that are habitually enacted by members of a community to realize particular
social purposes" (Orlikowski and Yates, 1994, p. 542). This paper studies the
evolution of an email-based genre repertoire and examines whether it is related
to the degree of complexity associated to different tasks and to the phases of
group development. The analysis focuses on the case of an international
research team involved in a European project that uses mainly e-mail and other
CMC technologies in order to execute different kinds of tasks.

Scientific communities can be seen as a specific type of Communities of
Practice (CoP). In this paper we analyze scientific communities from the CoP
point of view. We show how models and design principles from CoP can be
interpreted and adapted for scientific communities. Taking the CSCL
(Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) community as an example, we
instantiate the adapted design principles and trace the development of this
community based on an analysis of its first decade of existence (1995-2005).
This analysis includes an analysis of CSCL conference proceedings and an
analysis of the lists of participants and program committee members of CSCL
conferences.

A study of Online Discussions in an Open-Source Software Community:
Reconstructing Thematic Coherence and Argumentation from Quotation Practices

This paper presents an analysis of online discussions in Open Source
Software (OSS) design. The objective of our work is twofold. First, our
research aims to understand and model the dynamics of OSS design that take
place in mailing list exchanges. Second, our more long term objective is to
develop tools to assist OSS developers to extract and reconstruct design
relevant information from previous discussions. We show how quotation practices
can be used to locate design relevant data in discussion archives. OSS
developers use quotation as a mechanism to maintain the discursive context. To
retrace thematic coherence in the online discussions of a major OSS project,
Python, we follow how messages are linked through quotation practices. We
compare our quotation-based analysis with a more conventional, thread-based
analysis of the (reply-to) links between messages. The advantages of a
quotation-based analysis over a thread-based analysis are outlined. Our
approach provides a means to analyze argumentation and design rationales and
promises a novel means to discover design relevant information in the archives
of online discussions. Our analysis reveals also the links between the social
structure and elements in the discussion space and how it shapes influence in
the design process.

Experiments

To promote democracy, governments have encouraged citizens to voice their
opinions on a number of issues. In this paper, the Government-to-Citizen (G2C)
aspect of electronic government, focuses on Citizen Relationship Management
(CzRM). The highest stage of evolution in CzRM is participative democracy. One
channel to promote participative democracy is through e-forums, which can
enable a government to become "citizen-centric" to reflect the concept of good
governance. In Thailand, e-forums have never been used as a formal consultative
channel with citizens. The government has yet to organize a formal e-forum to
consult citizens as it has done in off-line public hearings. In this research,
a prototype of government e-forum was developed and evaluated. The application
of the e-forum is to conduct an online hearing on wastewater issues.

E-Commerce, Communities and Government: A Snapshot of the Australian
Experience

This paper is based on a research study of 12 local government councils in
Australia funded by the Victorian e-Commerce Early Movers Assistance Scheme.
(VEEM). Multiple cross-case content analyses were used to identify the
underpinning themes in the study sample. It was found that the VEEM scheme was
successful in raising awareness of e-Commerce within the community, however
there is a wide disparity in local government readiness for e-Commerce and
community demand for e-Commerce. In order to accelerate the take-up of
e-Commerce practices and technologies within communities, the tripartite
relationship between State and Local government and the community is considered
critical in diffusing e-Commerce. Specifically, the tripartite relationship
should support raising awareness of e-commerce, and encouraging adoption of
e-commerce.

Collective Action in Electronic Networks of Practice: An Empirical Study of
Three Online Social Structures

Electronic networks of practice are computer-mediated social spaces in which
individuals working on similar problems self-organize to help each other and
share perspectives. Based on previous research positing that the interaction
created by network participants produces an online public good of knowledge,
the purpose of this empirical paper is to use theories of public goods and
collective action to investigate this provision of knowledge. While based on
the same technology platform and a similar concept, we examine three cases in
different professions: education, healthcare, and tourism by examining how the
1) heterogeneity of the individuals, 2) relational structure of social ties, 3)
norms of behavior, 4) affective factors, and 5) sanctions for noncompliance
impact the creation of a public good. We find that the most successful effort
to create an electronic network of practice was within education and that one
contributing factor was the site's ability to leverage existing offline
networks of practice to create a relational structure of stronger social ties
between members. In summary, these results reveal that taking a unitary view of
the underlying collective masks possible heterogeneity along a number of
important dimensions and as a result may undermine the likelihood that the
public good is created and maintained.

Bridging among Ethnic Communities by Cross-cultural Communities of Practice

The integration of immigrants is a big challenge for western societies. In
this paper we describe how to bridge between ethnically defined communities by
means of computer-supported project work. Our approach is grounded in
socio-cultural theories of learning, especially Community of Practice (CoP). To
evaluate our approach, we have built up a computer club in a multi cultural
neighbourhood of the city of Bonn. Parents and children of mainly German and
Turkish origin work jointly to create multimedia artefacts. These artefacts
represent aspects of the neighbourhood's recent history. The paper describes
the project and its theoretical background. We also provide empirical findings
to evaluate our approach.

We propose a novel approach for supporting privacy management that leverages
community experience and expertise via the process of social navigation. Social
navigation simplifies the often complex task of managing privacy settings, and
systems that employ social navigation can advantageously complement user
privacy management processes. We implemented our approach to privacy management
in the Acumen system; Acumen uses social navigation to enable individuals to
manage their Internet cookies both manually and automatically based on the
behavior of others in the community. We present the Acumen system in detail and
discuss data obtained from a six-week, preliminary deployment of Acumen.
Lastly, we discuss challenges that systems implementing our approach must
address if they are to be successful.

Systems

Regulation Mechanisms in an Open Social Media using a Contact Recommender
System

This paper presents how an information exchange network can be improved by
users' collaboration. This social media is based on content recommendation.
Instead of using an automated content recommender system, we suggest an
alternative approach where the information comes from trusted users. In order
to overcome traditional problems of an open social media, we propose some
regulation mechanisms. First each user manually controls her/his contacts
network. Second we have introduced a contact recommender system to help users
to carefully open their closed relationship network. This recommender system
selects the recommended relationships in such a way it should optimize some
global qualities of the social media. This paper details the algorithms of this
recommendation process.

A number of dimensions are relevant in order to successfully support
community life and development. These dimensions include the easiness and broad
spectrum of participation, the provision of value in return to the
contributions, the visibility of community activity, the support of different
levels of membership, the openness to the external world, and the support for
evolving phases of the community life. In this paper we present a system that
has been designed in order to tackle those dimensions with a particular
attention to participation issues. We present first the sources of requirements
that have informed the system design and which include the user observation of
two companies. Then we present the system, stressing the features of
integration with the daily working environment and the provision of multiple
situated views, as a means to address the elicited requirements. Finally, we
compare our design choices with a broader set of requirements that we have
derived from literature.